The Foreign Service Journal, May 2011

46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 1 1 of October, were sure we had this year all figured out. Or did we? New Challenges My 20th high school reunion fell during the first week- end of August. My father thoughtfully flew up to watch the girls while Little Guy and I had our own adventures over Labor Day weekend in Memphis. Earlier that week, I’d felt a lump in my right breast and, even more fright- ening, a bit of pain. I consulted Dr. Google immediately and tried to console myself with the notion that most painful lumps are not cancerous. I went on the trip, en- joyed myself and resolved to see an obstretician/gynecol- ogist once the kids were settled in school. Four weeks later, I was again trying to calm myself while being subjected to three mammograms, two ultra- sounds and a fine-needle biopsy in a two-hour period—all while Peter was more than 6,000 miles away. I had not told him about the lump, for I was completely convinced it was nothing. But “nothing” soon turned into everything. Late on the afternoon of Oct. 8, I was given the official diagnosis of not one, but two types of breast cancer. By 6:45 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 11, Peter was walk- ing into our house for what he hoped would be a short trip home. Instead, he curtailed from his tour in Baghdad at the end of December and accepted a job at Diplomatic Security headquarters, since we now have a few uncer- tainties in our future. We worked so hard to make this year go smoothly. We thought we had prepared in every way possible, and when things didn’t work out, we tried our best tomake them right. Little did we know that life had so much more in store for us than the usual realities of an unaccompanied tour. Instead of looking forward to Peter’s second rest-and- recreation trip, now we are navigating a completely dif- ferent type of situation — one we never expected. While the unaccompanied tour in Iraq was sometimes difficult, we always found solutions to our problems. As we embark on a new set of challenges, I only hope the same will be true again. F O C U S